Maintain Databases

Brothers

Importing Data

Importing allows you to insert
many records into the database in one go. This would save you
manually adding new entries into the database one by one. The file
to be imported needs to be in a certain format, referred to as a
tab-delimited file.

Exhaustive validation
of data to be imported is not carried out by the program. It
assumes that you, as the user, have ensured the data to be imported
is valid and that it is indeed appropriate to do so. You import
data entirely at your own risk and I accept no responsibility for
any loss of data caused.

When you press the Import
button, it displays a dialogue for you to select the data file to
import. You are informed if the file could not be opened for
whatever reason.

Please note that if you
are importing a previously exported file, you must delete the
header rows of text from the file first (this is the first line in
the text file naming what each item represents). Failure to
remove this text line will generate errors during
importing.

You are then asked if you want
to delete the current table contents. Please be aware of any
other tables which might refer to this current table. If you delete
such entries, you are effectively removing this relationship.
It won't actually delete the table until it has established that it
is safe to add the import data. If you choose not to delete the
table, or the program can't delete the table for some reason, it
will append the data instead (if the data being
imported is valid to append).

If the data file is being
appended to the current table, then it will check to see if the
brother's name already exists in the table. If found, you will be
notified and the import process will be terminated. Duplicate
entries found within the import data itself will simply get
ignored, so only the first entry will get added. Also, if it was
unable to read in entry information from the file, you will again
be informed and importing will stop.

When the import data has been
validated, it proceeds to import the records into the database.

As mentioned at the top of this
help topic, the import file must be tab-delimited, which
means that each line of text in the file represents an entry to add
into the database. The information on each line is separated using
TAB characters. The order of the information on each line must
match the following template: